Come Out the Wilderness: Memoir of a Black Woman Artist

In this memoir of growing up in segregated Louisville, Ky., in the 1950s and becoming an artist, cultural activist and professor, the promise of M jozo's ambition to record regional and religious shifts is never fully realized. In M jozo's account of her childhood, the resonance of Southern black Protestantism is limited to clich d references (she describes her great grandfather as ""a preacher whose voice was thunder"") and by chapter titles borrowed from Negro spirituals. One of only 10 black students in her Catholic high school in the early '60s, M jozo ventured downtown to observe early civil rights demonstrations and saw white classmates selling ""guaranteed rotten eggs"" to throw at black demonstrators. Clinging to her Catholicism, she apparently remained unaware of the deeply Protestant roots of the movement. Yearning for a black milieu when she went to college, M jozo entered and won a Miss Black Expo contest because it offered a scholarship to a traditional black college. Her winning poem featured a spirited dialogue between Eve and the serpent in the garden that was so sophisticated it drew charges of plagiarism from nuns at her school. Later, M jozo attributed her first husband's violence against her to his ""Black man frustration,"" sought counseling and finally left him two years later, struggling to obtain an annulment so that, if she decided to remarry (which she did), she would not be barred from communion. This rare story in which Catholicism is the crux of the evolution of a black, female literature professor and artist ultimately suffers from stilted, formal language. (Apr.)